On February 15, 2011, the Austrian anti-jihad activist Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff was convicted of hate speech in a Vienna courtroom. The original charge against her was “incitement to hatred”. On the second day of her trial, the judge decided to added a second charge, “denigration of religious beliefs of a legally recognized religion.” The latter count is the one on which Elisabeth was convicted. …

The prosecution and the judge in Elisabeth’s case apparently settled on the sentence long before considering a verdict. …

The judge in the case, Bettina Neubauer, convicted Elisabeth for saying that Mohammed was a pedophile. There’s only one problem: Elisabeth never said any such thing. As the transcript of her seminar demonstrates, Elisabeth in fact said that “Mohammed had a thing for little kids”, the plain facts of which even the judge was forced to accept.

In other words, the judge in Elisabeth’s trial, acting on her own initiative, put words into Elisabeth’s mouth and then convicted her for saying them.

We have unqualified sympathy with Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, but have to say that we cannot see any significant difference between the alleged and the actual statement. She should have been free to say it either way, to make her point as she chose.

Here is the story behind the prosecution from Front Page, also by Ned May:

Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff is the daughter of a retired diplomat in the Austrian foreign service. During her childhood and young adulthood she experienced Islam up close and personal, in places such as Libya, Kuwait, Iraq, and Iran. She was in Tehran with her parents during the Islamic Revolution of 1979. As a student, she was working during her summer break in Kuwait when Saddam Hussein invaded the country. On September 11, 2001, Elisabeth was working in the Austrian embassy in Tripoli. She saw the Libyan people celebrate the destruction of the World Trade Center and the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans. All of these experiences were lessons she took to heart, but 9-11 motivated her to examine Islam more closely over the next few years.

In October 2007 Elisabeth attended the Counterjihad Brussels conference and delivered the country report on the state of Islamization in Austria. In early 2008 she began a series of seminars on Islam in Vienna, explaining to interested parties what the Qur’an and the hadith actually teach, along with the basic tenets of Islamic law.

For the next year and a half the interest in her seminars grew, and attendance increased. The success of her lectures drew the interest of Austrian leftists, who are as determined as leftists in other Western countries to discredit and destroy the work of those they view as “racists”, “fascists”, and “Islamophobes”. Unbeknownst to Elisabeth, the left-wing magazine NEWS sent a reporter to one of her seminars to make a surreptitious recording of it. …

The complainant in the case against Elisabeth was not the state, but NEWS magazine itself, the publication whose reporter had infiltrated the seminar. For the next ten months the possibility of a formal charge was left hanging over Elisabeth’s head, but she received no official word about what might happen to her. All she could do was retain legal counsel and wait.

In February 2010 she gave a deposition to the Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Prevention of Terrorism. After that there was nothing from the prosecutor’s office. Finally, on September 15, Elisabeth learned that a formal charge would be filed against her. Ironically enough, she didn’t find out through a court document, an official summons, or her lawyer. Instead she learned of the charge by reading about it in the press — in NEWS, the very same magazine that had published the undercover report and filed the complaint against her. … A few days later she received official notice from the court [setting] her trial date …

Now the verdict has been given. She has been notified of it by her lawyers, who wrote in part:

You were found, however, to have committed the offense of denigration of a religion because of your statements in the seminars of October 15, 2009 and November 12, 2009 about Mohammed and his sexual intercourse with nine year-old Aisha. The judge’s basis for that focused on the circumstance that the offense of § 188 StGB is an abstract criminal threat, and therefore the mere aptness to cause offense was sufficient to qualify as the crime. What was incomprehensible was the judge’s conclusion that Mohammed’s sexual contact with nine-year-old Aisha was not pedophilia, because Mohammed continued his marriage to Aisha until his death.

Punishment was set at 120 per diem payments of €4, in total €480 or an alternative sentence of 60 days imprisonment.

Take a deep breath, everyone, and think about the implications of the above material.

Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff was convicted for stating the plain facts: the prophet Mohammed had sex with a nine-year-old-girl. She never used the word pedophilia; she simply described in everyday language the prophet’s … tastes.

The statements she made are not considered false by [observing] Muslims. They are written down in Islamic scripture, and are considered correct and authoritative by virtually every Islamic scholar and theologian.

These scriptural passages are not considered offensive to Muslims when they are recited in a mosque or a madrassa. Mohammed was the perfect man, so by definition his actions cannot be offensive. They are in fact exemplary. That is why Muslim men continue to marry little girls to this day.

Elisabeth’s statements are offensive because they were made by a non-Muslim in public, and brought discredit upon Islam in the eyes of other non-believers.

This offense is referred to as “Islamic slander”, and is a grave violation of Islamic law. Under sharia, the penalty is death.

But it is only illegal under sharia.

Monday’s verdict had nothing to do with Austrian law, or European law. It was based solely on the unwritten laws of politically correct Multiculturalism, which absolutely forbids the offending of Muslims.

This entire judicial farce was necessary in order to establish a sharia-based precedent in Austria.

– and so in Europe.

Europe is retreating from the Enlightenment. Going back into the darkness that reigned before it in the European mind. The thinkers who brought the new morning after the long night when Christian churches of one sort or another had tyrannized over the nations of the continent and beyond, took the great leap forward by denigrating religious belief. Hume, Spinoza, Diderot, Voltaire …… dared to criticize religious belief both specifically and generally. Their intellectual victory made the scientific discoveries of the last three hundred years possible. But the ruling class of Europe cares nothing for its heritage.

If Austria wants to save itself, every decent Austrian should now go into the streets and shout “Muhammad was a pedophile!” If Europe wants to save itself, every European should do it.

They should write it on walls, print it on the front page of every newspaper, on bumper-stickers, on T-shirts, on billboards, on banners trailed in the sky; announce it on the stage of every theatre, in movies, in television ads, at sports events, on radio, in parliament, in songs; write it in emails, on facebook, on twitter, in cartoons, jokes, books ……

The fact that Arab culture generally was what we might justifiably call “pedophilic” when Muhammad lived, in that little girls, even pre-pubescent little girls, were forcibly married to men any number of years older than themselves, and still are, can only make such a campaign the more vital at any time. But the really important thing right now is that a non-Muslim is not allowed to say that Muhammad was a pedophile in Austria (or anywhere else in Europe it is safe to guess), because Muhammad and his nasty religion Islam are protected from criticism.

It is good and right to criticize Muhammad and Islam. More, it is an absolute necessity if we are to win the war Islam is waging against us; and if we are to preserve the legacy of the Enlightenment, free and open enquiry into everything and anything, not only in the natural world but also in history and the world of ideas. That is what Islam must fear the most.